Instagram Stories Adds Regram Feature

A little Instagram Stories update for all you Instagram Stories fans out there. (At this point, who isn’t a fan of Instagram Stories … other than maybe the folks over at Snapchat.) The platform announced on Thursday that it is rolling out a reposting — regramming, if you will — feature to users. Now, if you see something in your feed that you want to share via Stories, you’ll be able to do it with just a few button taps. No more screenshotting and weird formatting.

To share a feed post to your story, just tap the paper airplane button below the post, just as you would to send it via Direct. At the top, you’ll now see the option to create a story. Tap it to see the feed post as a sticker with a customized background ready to share to your story. You can rotate, scale and move the sticker — and tap it to explore other styles.

Of course, handy as this might be, it’s not really the regramming feature Instagram could use the most. Ask anybody out there using a third-party app whenever they want to repost a photo from another user. The feature is available now on Android, and Instagram says iOS users can expect it soon. Alternatively, as an iOS user, I’d happily skip this feature in exchange for a chronological timeline. (Though Instagram did recently promise that it would tweak its algorithm to show newer photos first.)

#BREAKING: I’m told the entire @BPDAlerts Emergency Response Team has resigned from the team, a total of 57 officers, as a show of support for the officers who are suspended without pay after shoving Martin Gugino, 75. They are still employed, but no longer on ERT. @news4buffalo

In case you were wondering about the unmarked federal agents dotting Washington

Few sights from the nation’s protests in recent days have seemed more dystopian than the appearance of rows of heavily armed riot police around Washington, D.C., in drab military-style uniforms with no insignia, identifying emblems or names badges. Many of the apparently federal agents have refused to identify which agency they work for. “Tell us who you are, identify yourselves!” protesters demanded, as they stared down the helmeted, sunglass-wearing mostly white men outside the White House. Eagle-eyed protesters have identified some of them as belonging to Bureau of Prisons’ riot police units from Texas, but others remain a mystery.

The images of such heavily armed, military-style men in America’s capital are disconcerting, in part, because absent identifying signs of actual authority the rows of federal officers appear all-but indistinguishable from the open-carrying, white militia members cos-playing as survivalists who have gathered in other recent protests against pandemic stay-at-home orders. Some protesters have compared the anonymous armed officers to Russia’s “Little Green Men,” the soldiers-dressed-up-as-civilians who invaded and occupied western Ukraine. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday demanding that federal officers identify themselves and their agency.

To understand the police forces ringing Trump and the White House it helps to understand the dense and not-entirely-sensical thicket of agencies that make up the nation’s civilian federal law enforcement. With little public attention, notice and amid historically lax oversight, those ranks have surged since 9/11—growing by roughly 2,500 officers annually every year since 2000. To put it another way: Every year since the 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has added to its policing ranks a force larger than the entire Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).